"What makes this court unique is that were dealing with people who haven't committed crimes, they're ill, ” said Paul Parris, acting that day as bailiff for mental health court, held in Department 14 in …

Canned goods were to dinner what poetry was to prose and pickled beets one of the prettiest canning products. The bright red pigments bleed out a rich wine red into the pickling liquid.

Stretching east of 30th Street, the Mid-City mesa has for decades been a Gasoline Alley wasteland of car washes, card parlors, dinky pink bungalows: low-rent neighborhoods whose obscurity is secured by distance from freeway off-ramps.

Early Saturday morning, five women and four children share seats on the San Ysidro trolley. The children sit primly, staring out windows at the emptied weekend city slipping by. Three women are black, one is …

From 1881 until her death, Jekyll was the premier influence on English gardeners, coaxing them to eschew the elaborately formal Italian and French garden models in favor of "cottage gardens on a country house scale."

Bulging stained manila file folders spewing yellow legal pads hugged to his chest, pin-striped charcoal suit coat over-large on his narrow shoulders, curly gray-streaked brown hair neatly caught up in a ponytail, Alex Landon slips …

l tell you again that I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, …

In a March 1989 interview with the Reader, John explained the move to La Jolla: “We were doing movies. We wanted to be close to Hollywood but not in L.A.” The two-story La Jolla Shores house overlooked the ocean.

They relieve themselves on floors, set fire to drapes, smear walls with excrement, toss drawers and dishes and mirrors out windows, break windows, are blasting the 2 Live Crew or Barbra Streisand or Brahms’s Third …

"People will ask me, ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes, I have a brother and I have a sister, but I don’t know if she’s dead or alive.’ ”

I have stretched out on the couch — a plumpish well-lit haven upholstered with rough, nubby cotton, ivory in color. In the kitchen the man I love shuts and opens and shuts the oven door. …

In fall, Coburn noted, changes are going on above and below ground. Soil temperature is lower. I touched the crumbly dirt onto the fig leaves had fallen and thought it felt cool.

The courtroom door swings open. The eyes of the family of Julio Hernandez (felony case number 107301) lock on the tall man - tie swinging, jacket flying - who veers toward them. Never quite breaking …

Stevens barked, “Put your hands up in the air.” Cripdown brought up his arms. “Step away from the vehicle.” Cripdown took two sideways steps away from the Cadillac. “Slowly turn in a circle.”

In a La Jolla oceanfront hotel, an elderly anorexic alcoholic picked at tiny oysters bedded in spinach and told me the story of her life. Orphaned at 8, married at 18 — “Married well!” She …

"Mandela isn't a hero to me. Ever'body equates us —black Americans —with Africa people, but I don't equate myself with those people because I don't know anything about them. . My people, the Alabama people, was Blackfoot Indians."

I stop Faulkner, ask what a maggot feels like when he holds it in his hand. "If it’s a blowfly maggot and it’s alive, it feels pretty sturdy. They’re resilient. They are soft. They’re not warm.”

As a teenager, I dismissed adults’ dismissal of the new with the thought that these grown-ups (who also hated Elvis and despised Jerry Lee) merely preferred elevator music for canvas, eye Muzak.

Pete tells Wayne about survival food, the bazooka. Wayne rubs his brow with an Amtrak napkin. Pete says that one night, in Detroit, when he’d smoked too much crack— ‘‘You guys know crack?” he asks and we nod obediently.

I doubt any of you who grew up with brothers and sisters can easily imagine how intensely the only child (even as an adult) looks forward to his lunch or squash game with you.

The WELL evolved from the back-to-the-land utopianism that produced Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and Brand, who writes on The WELL as SBB, was one of the system's founders and developers.

Five feet 4 inches in height, 120 pounds when he “got his full growth,” Victor Krulak was dubbed “Brute” by his fellow cadets at Annapolis. The nickname stuck. The now-77-year-old retired marine Lt. Gen. Krulak …

At 75 he still mourned his mother. He dreamed about her often. Stood, like Babar, in the window, remembered her. Saw her in her coffin. Dreamed of my mother. The house we’d lived in.

Early in the couple’s marriage, Ellen made Vincent promise that he would see to it that she died in her own bed next to him and not among strangers. Whether this promise will be kept drives Gordon’s novel.

Tidying shelves as we walk past poetry — Auden. Berryman. Chaucer, Cicero, Coleridge. Dante. De La Mare. Dickinson, Donne — Chuck, Jr., smiles, asks. "Do you know how many pressed flowers we find in books?"

Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.

Back in the U.S., Bryson borrowed his mother’s Chevrolet Chevette and set out upon a 38-state quest to find one town that is “an amalgam” of all the towns he'd encountered in movies

“Ray Bradbury,” Brizzolara continued, “talking about detective fiction set in California, described it as ‘the literature of sadness and strange endings on the California coast.’ And this has always made sense to me.

Veteran Readers The first three Vietnam Vets whom I asked, "What novels about the Vietnam War have you read?" hadn't read many. All three served in the Marine Corps, all were in boot camp in …

He thinks about San Diego “all the time. Whenever I eat an avocado, every time I buy an Hawaiian shirt, when I feel physically comfortable — because I often felt comfortable in San Diego."

Jim Harrell makes a fist. Shows a brown hump of knuckle. How the fist feels is hard. It’s not as big as a breadbox, but pretty near the size of a pound round loaf of …

The Southwest was Paradise Lost. California was Paradise Regained, an alter-Eden. From rutted, dustblown land outside Tulsa, Little Rock, and Topeka, California appeared epic and opulent: orange groves, vineyards, an eternal now of seasonless calm. Just to dig your heels into El Centro, into Bakersfield soil could change your life, turn your luck.

“I sat there for 30 minutes. No one helped. Finally, some guy comes along in a pickup, Confederate flags all over the windshield. He stops, gets out, says, ‘Let me see if I can help you.’"

"I begin to see that this [U.S. involvement in Vietnam] was not cool, and I shared that with my father and we had a parting of the way. But not for long. He came around."

The camps published weekly newspapers — Migratory Clipper, Pea Pickers Prairie, The Tow Sack Tattler. Beneath the disclaimer, “Neither the Farm Security Administration, nor its employees accept ‘Editorial Responsibility,’ the papers were written and edited by the migrants and typed onto stencils and mimeographed.

Molly, my friend Jerry's cocker spaniel, met me on the patio. Blond Molly wagged her stub of a tail, jumped up, danced, rolled onto her back. I petted her warm stomach. She turned to her …

A few days earlier, says Brother David, a man living in Arenales “got killed on the other side,” in the U.S. The man was rumored to have supported his family by going across the border and robbing houses.

Outside Abercrombie and Fitch, a blond surfer — tanned Alex — waggled fur-lined boots a plaid Pendleton scarf, fur-lined leather gloves He snarled. “I don't feel the need to these in Southern California. They’re going back to the store.”

AS 1939 OPENS... Worldwide depression with full employment only in Germany. Hitler came to power in 1933. Since 1935 Jews in Germany have been stripped of property and basic civil rights. By 1937 129,000 — …

She sighs. “But I can wear jeans and a slobbed-out shirt, and if my nails are painted, I feel glamorous." She lifts her glance from my fingers to my eyes. “You know what I mean?”

An August Sunday afternoon, lemonade weather. Leaves drooped on Balboa Park's giant eucalyptus. The Home States picnic, an annual event of America's Finest City Week, sponsored by the San Diego Junior Chamber of Commerce, drew …

The two-story Children’s Hospital Center (or Child Protection sits at one edge of the Children’s Hospital campus on Kearny Mesa. Walking through the center’s first-floor hallway, a visitor finds gaily painted rooms furnished with child-size …

"My room, it’s eight-by-twelve at the most. I took a small room — sixty-five a week. There was a bed in it, a table, no chest of drawers, no closet. Not as large as a jail cell.”

Years pass, winters, Watergate. Five o’clock stubble shadows the jowls. I hear from my mother that the piano teacher had a “nervous breakdown.” We’re slow-dancing at the Elks Club to Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You.”

“The first thing we have here by you at the desk in the pet cemetery office is the box of Kleenex,” says Velma Matthews. “That means, ‘We offer you our sympathy.’ The Kleenex is used …

Aurore and Ethel Lee await their turn in the shuffleboard tourney. In the winter of life, they sit, legs crossed at ankles, on folding chairs at a card table. The skin on the tops of …

We stood outside her Mission Hills home. She nodded toward a two-story house half a block uphill and said, "That was my father’s house." She led the way down stone steps set into a steep …

Let’s say you and I, we’re dealing dope. We argue over price. Say I’m a 300-pounder. You put a knife into me and kill me — unjustifiably. I’m sitting there on your sofa, a 300-pound …

We are looking at old photographs. There is the rundown frame house in Lowgap, North Carolina, where Charles, born in 1949, lived for three years. Next in the stack is Charles’s first school picture: blond …

Rumor will have it that I am at work on a novel set in the town. It will be said, “She has been a cross, God knows.” “He has not, you know, worn himself out, carrying it.”